Sharpe’s Rifles: The French Invasion of Galicia, January 1809

More than a hundred men were abandoned in the village. There was nothing to be done for them. They were drunk. A score of women stayed with them. They were drunk too.

Not just drunk, but insensible. The men had broken into a tavern’s storeroom and found great barrels of last year’s vintage with which they had diluted their misery. Now, in a bleak dawn, they lay about the village like the victims of a plague.

The drunks were redcoats. They had joined the British army because of crime or desperation, and because the army gave them a third of a pint of rum a day. Last night they had found heaven in a miserable tavern in a miserable Spanish town on a miserable flint road that led to the sea. They had got drunk, so now they would be left to the mercy of the French.

A tall Lieutenant in the green jacket of the 95th Rifles moved among the bodies which lay in the stable yard of the plundered tavern. His interest was not in the stupefied drunks, but in some wooden crates that had been jettisoned from an ox-drawn waggon to make space for wounded and frost-bitten men. The crates, like so much else that the army was now too weak to carry, would have been left for the pursuing French, except that the Lieutenant had discovered that they contained rifle ammunition. He was rescuing it. He had already filled the packs and pouches of his Battalion with as many of the precious cartridges as the Riflemen could carry; now he and one Rifleman crammed yet more into the panniers of the Battalion’s last mule.

Rifleman Cooper finished the job then stared at the remaining crates. ‘What do we do with them, sir?’

‘Burn it all.’

‘Bloody hell!’ Cooper gave a brief laugh, then gestured at the drunks in the yard. ‘You’ll bleedin’ kill ’em!’

‘If we don’t, the French will.’ The Lieutenant had a slash of a scar on his left cheek that gave him a broodingly savage face. ‘You want the French to start killing us with our own gunpowder?’

Cooper did not much care what the French did. At this moment he cared about a drunken girl who lay in the yard’s corner. ‘Pity to kill her, sir. She’s a nice little thing.’

‘Leave her for the French.’

Cooper stooped to pull open the girl’s bodice to reveal her breasts. She stirred in the cold air, but did not waken. Her hair was stained with vomit, her dress with wine, yet she was a pretty girl. She was perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, she had married a soldier and followed him to the wars. Now she was drunk and the French would have her. ‘Wake up!’ he said.

‘Leave her!’ All the same the Lieutenant could not resist crossing the yard to look down at the girl’s nakedness. ‘Stupid bitch,’ he said sourly.

A Major appeared in the yard’s entrance. ‘Quarter-master?’

The Lieutenant turned. ‘Sir?’

The Major had a small wiry moustache and a malevolent expression. ‘When you’ve finished undressing women, Quartermaster, perhaps you’d be good enough to join the rest of us?’

‘I was going to burn these crates first, sir.’

‘Bugger the crates, Quartermaster. Just hurry up!’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Unless you’d prefer to stay here? I doubt the army would miss you?’

The Lieutenant did not reply. Six months ago, when he had joined this Battalion, no officer would have spoken thus in front of the men, but the retreat had jaded tempers and brought hidden antagonisms to the surface. Men who would normally have treated each other with wary respect or even a forced cordiality, now snapped like rabid dogs. And Major Warren Dunnett hated the Quartermaster. It was a livid, irrational and consuming hatred, and the Quartermaster’s annoying response was to ignore it. That, and his air of competence, could provoke Major Dunnett into a livid anger. ‘Who in Christ’s holy name does he think he is?’ he exploded to Captain Murray outside the tavern. ‘Does he think the whole bloody army will wait for him?’

‘He’s just doing his job, isn’t he?’ John Murray was a mild and fair man.

‘He’s not doing his job. He’s gaping at some whore’s tits.’ Dunnett spat. ‘I didn’t bloody want him in this Battalion, and I still don’t bloody want him in the Battalion. The Colonel only took him as a favour to Willie Lawford. What the hell is this bloody army coming to? He’s a jumped-up sergeant, Johnny! He isn’t even a real officer! And in the Rifles, too!’

Murray suspected that Dunnett was jealous of the Quartermaster. It was a rare thing for a man to join Britain’s army as a private soldier and to rise into the officers’ mess. The Quartermaster had done that. He had carried a musket in the red-coated ranks, become a Sergeant, then, as a reward for an act of suicidal bravery on a battlefield, he had been made into an officer. The other officers were wary of the new Lieutenant’s past, fearing that his competence in battle would show up their own inexperience. They need not have worried, for the Colonel had kept the new Lieutenant from the battle-line by making him into the Battalion’s Quartermaster; an appointment based on the principle that any man who had served in the ranks and as a Sergeant would know every trick of the Quartermaster’s criminal trade.

Abandoning both the drunks and the remaining ammunition to the French, the Quartermaster emerged from the tavern yard. It began to rain; a sleet-cold rain that spat from the east onto the three hundred Riflemen who waited in the village street. These Riflemen were the army’s rearguard; a rearguard dressed in rags like a mockery of soldiers, or like some monstrous army of beggars. Men and officers alike were draped and bundled in whatever scraps of cloth they had begged or stolen on the march, the soles of their boots held in place by knotted twine. Their unshaven faces were wrapped with filthy scarves against the bitter wind. Their eyes were red-rimmed and vacant, their cheeks were sunken, and their eyebrows whitened by frost. Some men had lost their shakos and wore peasant hats with floppy brims. They looked a beaten, ragtag unit, but they were still Riflemen and every Baker rifle had an oiled lock and, gripped in its doghead, a sharp-edged flint.

Major Dunnett, who commanded this half Battalion, marched them westwards. They had been marching since Christmas Eve, and now it was a week into January. Always west away from the victorious French whose overwhelming numbers were swamping Spain, and every day of the march was a torture of cold and hunger and pain. In some Battalions all discipline had disappeared and the paths of such units were littered with the bodies of men who had given up hope. Some of the dead were women; the wives who had been permitted to travel with the army to Spain. Others were children. The survivors were now so hardened to horror that they could trudge past the frozen body of a child and feel nothing.

Yet if the army had been broken on the rack of ice-storms and a frozen wind that cut like a chasseur’s sabre, there were still some men who marched in good formation and who, when ordered, turned to keep the French pursuit at bay. Those were the hard men, the good men; the Guards and the Light Infantry, the elite of Sir John Moore’s army that had marched into the centre of Spain to cut off Napoleon’s supply roads. They had marched expecting victory, but the Emperor had turned on them with a savage speed and overwhelming numbers, so now this small British army retreated towards the ships that would take them home.

Dunnett’s three hundred Riflemen seemed alone in a frozen wilderness. Somewhere ahead of them was the bulk of the retreating army, and somewhere behind were the pursuing French, but the Riflemen’s world was the pack of the man in front, the sleet, their tiredness, and the pain of bellies cramped by hunger.

An hour from the village they reached a stream crossed by a stone bridge. British cavalry waited there with news that some artillery was floundering on a slope two miles ahead. The cavalry’s commander suggested that Dunnett’s Rifles wait by the bridge. ‘Give us time to help the gunners to the ridge, then we’ll come back for you.’

‘How long?’ Dunnett asked testily.

‘An hour? No longer.’

The Riflemen waited. They had done this a score of times in the last two weeks, and doubtless they would do it a score of times again. They were the sting in the army’s tail. If they were lucky this day no Frenchman would bother them, but the probability was that, sometime in the next hour, the enemy vanguard would appear. That vanguard would be cavalry on tired horses. The French would make a token attack, the Riflemen would fire a couple of volleys; then, because neither side had an advantage, the French would let the greenjackets trudge on. It was soldiering; boring, cold, dispiriting, and one or two Riflemen and one or two Frenchmen would die because of it.

The Riflemen formed in companies to bar the road west of the bridge. They shivered and stared east. Sergeants paced behind their ranks. The officers, all of whom had lost their horses to the cold, stood in front of their companies. No one spoke. Perhaps some of the men dreamed of the Navy’s ships that were supposed to be waiting for them at the end of this long road, but more likely their thoughts were of nothing but cold and hunger.

The Lieutenant who had been made into the Battalion’s Quartermaster wandered aimlessly onto the stone bridge and stared into the stinging sleet. He was now the closest man to the enemy, twenty paces ahead of the greenjacketed line, and that piqued Major Warren Dunnett who saw an unspoken arrogance in the Lieutenant’s chosen position. ‘Bugger him.’ Dunnett crossed to Captain Murray’s side.

‘He’s harmless.’ Murray spoke with his customary mildness.

‘He’s a jumped-up bloody nothing.’

Murray smiled. ‘He’s a damned efficient Quartermaster, Warren. When did your men last have so much ammunition?’

‘His job is to arrange my bed for tonight, not loiter here in the hope of proving how well he can fight. Look at him!’ Dunnett, like a man with an itching sore that he could not stop scratching, stared at the Quartermaster. ‘He thinks he’s still in the ranks, doesn’t he? Once a peasant, always one, that’s what I say. Why’s he carrying a rifle?’

‘I really couldn’t say.’

The rifle was the Quartermaster’s eccentricity, and an unfitting one, for a Quartermaster needed lists and ink and quills and tally-sticks, not a weapon. He needed to be able to forage for food or ferret out shelters in apparently overcrowded billets. He needed a nose to smell out rotten beef, scales to weigh ration flour, and stubbornness to resist the depredations of other Quartermasters. He did not need weapons, yet the new Lieutenant always carried a rifle as well as his regulation sabre. The two weapons seemed to be a statement of intent; that he wanted to fight rather than be a Quartermaster, yet to most of the greenjackets the weapons were a rather pathetic pretension carried by a man who, whatever his past, was now nothing more than an ageing Lieutenant.

Dunnett stamped his cold feet on the road. ‘I’ll send the flank companies back first, Johnny. You can cover.’

‘Yes, sir. Do we wait for our horse?’

‘Bugger the cavalry.’ Dunnett offered the infantryman’s automatic scorn of the mounted arm. ‘I’m waiting five more minutes. It can’t take this long to clear some bloody guns off the road. Do you see anything, Quartermaster?’ The question was asked mockingly.

‘No, sir.’ The Lieutenant took off his shako and pushed a hand through hair that was long, black, and made greasy by days of campaigning. His greatcoat hung open and he wore neither scarf nor gloves. Either he could not afford them, or else he was boasting that he was too tough to need such comforts. That arrogance made Dunnett wish that the new Lieutenant, so eager for a fight, would be cut down by the enemy horsemen.

Except there were no enemy horsemen in sight. Perhaps the rain and the wind and the God-damned bloody cold had driven the French to shelter in the last village. Or perhaps the drunken women had proved too irresistible a lure. Whichever it was, there were no Frenchmen in sight, just sleet and low clouds driven to turmoil by a freshening wind.

Major Dunnett swore nervously. The four companies seemed alone in a wilderness of rain and frost, four companies of forgotten soldiers in a lost war, and Dunnett made up his mind that he could wait no longer. ‘We’re going.’

Whistles blew. The two flank companies turned and, like the walking dead, shambled up the road. The two centre companies stayed at the bridge under Captain Murray’s command. In five minutes or so, when the flank companies had stopped to provide cover, it would be Murray’s turn to withdraw.

The Riflemen liked Captain John Murray. He was a proper gentleman, they said, and it was a fly bastard who could fool him; but if you were straight with him, then the Captain would treat you fair. Murray had a thin and humorous face, quick to smile and swift with a jest. It was because of officers like him that these Riflemen could still shoulder arms and march with an echo of the élan they had learned on the parade ground at Shorncliffe.

‘Sir!’ It was the Quartermaster who still stood on the bridge and drew Murray’s attention to the east where a figure moved in the sleet. ‘One of ours,’ he called after a moment.

The single figure, staggering and weaving, was a redcoat. He had no musket, no shako, nor boots. His naked feet left bloodstains on the road’s flint bed.

‘That’ll learn him,’ Captain Murray said. ‘You see, lads, the perils of drink?’